Blogging Roller

I gave my blogging and Roller talk to the combined Orlando and Gainesville Java User Groups last night. I think the talk was pretty well received among the 30 or 40 Java users in attendance, but I've only given a half dozen presentations so I felt a little wobbly. There were a couple of times where I could not find quite the right words to complete a thought, but overall I think I'm improving at public speaking (I just noticed that Sun-U offers a course called "executive presentations" -- maybe I should sign up for that).

The talk was really two talks in one, a blogging talk and a Roller talk. I call the blogging talk "Blogging: What's the Big Deal." It covers the basics of blogging and includes newsfeeds, newsfeed readers, web services API, blogs at work, K-logs, Cluetrain in a nutshell, and blogs for community building. In my opinion, the big deal is simple: blogging technologies make it easy for people and programs to read and write the web. That empowers writers of all varieties and creates lots of opportunities for software developers.

The Roller talk is designed to give potential Roller users an overview of Roller features, the status of the Roller project itself, and Roller architecture/internals. I also include some lessons learned about performance and scalability. The Roller talk is informative, but much less thought provoking than the blogging talk and that was reflected in the number of questions I recieved.

The questions were pretty interesting and almost all concerned blogs at work. Here are the questions and answers I remember:

Q: What role does ownership play in blogs and wikis? Is it really important that you put your name on your blog?. Ownership and identity play an important role in blogs and wikis, but more so blogs. Putting your name on your blog is how you get credit for your writing and the cool links you are pointing out. That said, anonymous bloggers play an important role too. Anonymous bloggers can safely speak more freely than named bloggers and this can be very important in some situations. Anonymous bloggers get credit too and can gain trust and authority by writing well, being honest, gaining readers, and earning links from other bloggers.

Q: Isn't there a risk that employees will be judged by the quantity and quality of their blogs, and we will therefore discriminate against introverts, people who'd rather work than write about working, and folks who's blogs are just not that cool? I guess there is some danger of this. As we do now, we'll have to trust folks to understand that people are different. Some people are quiet and private and prefer to work rather than to write and talk about work. I think this is mitigated by the fact that some folks who are introverts in a social setting might not be so introverted when online or writing in their blogs.

Q: I can understand allowing your employees to blog publicly, but was is the benefit of supporting them by providing them with company servers and support to do so? This question came before I got to my Cluetrain in a nutshell slide, so my answer was that providing employees with public blogs is a way to encourage them to blog and once I explain the Cluetrain you'll understand why I say that is a good thing.

Q: Blogs are essentially UseNet newsgroups "minus minus" without easy way to search all posts on a topic and without threading. Usually, with a new communications medium we move forward, not backwards. Are bloggers concerned about that? Yes, bloggers are concerned with this and there are efforts to make it easier to search blogs (e.g. Feedster) and to support threading of blog-to-blog "conversations" (e.g. permalink based threading in BlogLines and SharpReader). But blogs are a different medium and they don't replace newsgroups and forums. Subscribing to a blog is different that subscribing to a newsgroup. With newsgroups, you subscribe to a topic but with blogs you typically subscribe to a person or a group of people and topics can vary widely. I think that is a good thing; people are more interesting than topics.

Q: Is it possible for a blogger to sell subscriptions to his blog content? I admit that I have not been following the blogging for money discussions very closely, but after some mumbles I managed to come up with a couple of answers.

• Offer a free newsfeed to alert subscribers of new content, but require them to login to their non-free user account to view they full content.
• Use a Podcast approach to automatically download newly available content to user, but the downloaded content is in a password protected format.
• Require login to access your newsfeeds, but users would need a newsreader that can handle authentication.

But, newsfeeds are lossy aren't they. I mean, what happens if a user is offline for a couple of days and the user's newsreader misses some entries because they have already scrolled off the bottom of the newsfeed? Users that are paying for a subscription are going to much less forgiving about missing a couple of items.

That's all the questions I can remember. Slides should be available soon in PDF form on the Orlando JUG site.